


Stars, Hide Thy Fires

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: The Other Side Of The Coin [1]
Category: Primeval
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Implied Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-24
Updated: 2013-06-24
Packaged: 2018-03-08 22:51:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3226451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Claudia loses two men behind that Permian anomaly and gains another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stars, Hide Thy Fires

**Author's Note:**

> The alternate universe that Liz Lester visits in another fic of mine - assumes that two Nick Cutters and two Tom Ryans from two separate realities (a Claudia reality and a Jenny reality) went through the Permian anomalies, and the survivors returned through the wrong ones. Jenny!Ryan survived, and Claudia!Nick survived, but as per canon Claudia!Nick went to the Jenny reality and Jenny!Ryan went to the Claudia reality. Fred beta'd this. For one of the squares on my trope_bingo thing, ‘deathfic’. Apologies to Shakespeare for the title.

            So much blood, Nick’s thinking, but he can’t say it aloud because he’s not got much of a throat to say it with. So much blood, so much blood – _who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?_ And Nick feels old now for the first time, older than he did when Stephen teased him about his bad back, iced his dodgy knees and ridiculed the Seventies cartoons he watched as a child. He supposes he had to be old some time. Had to get a chance – despite Helen –

_And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full with direst cruelty_ – the Scottish play, yes, isn’t that apt, Nick’s scholar’s brain is thinking while his body draws breaths that don’t take, and Helen is the best Lady Macbeth he could ever imagine…

 

            Nick is beyond tears. He’d like to cry. But there’s one thing he’s got left to get across to the world and he can’t say that and sob. It has to be one or the other.

 

            Ryan’s solid, reliable face hoves into view: good old Ryan, as handy with silent sympathy as with a straight right to the jaw. Ryan can make this happen for him. Ryan will understand.

 

            “Claudia,” Nick gurgles, knowing Ryan will piece together ‘take care of Claudia, she’ll need you, she needs you’, from that. Knowing that he can rely on Ryan, who he was jealous of once, jealous of his (platonic) knowledge of Nick’s lover. He can sleep easy now. (If only it was easy.)

 

            Ryan’s face is a picture of both pity and confusion. “Claudia? Cutter, who’s Claudia?”

 

            Cutter blinks at him. He can do nothing else. Maybe Ryan’s had a bang on the head. He’ll come back to himself, Cutter knows he will, and in the meantime Cutter can die in (no particular) peace and (not a lot of) quiet.

 

            He hopes Helen chokes on her ill-gotten gains. She wouldn’t even kill him herself.

 

***

 

            Claudia took the bottle of whisky from Nick’s office. She doubts anyone will notice; after all, there’s no-one to notice any more. The Dean, the CMU cleaners, Nick’s colleagues, Nick’s students – only one of them ever knew their way around that mess well enough to make an inventory of it, and Stephen is ill. Heartsick, Claudia wants to say, but she’s had him signed off work with depression, and consigned him to Connor and Abby’s care, because nobody else will know what to do with him now. Abby has no nurturing instincts, not when it comes to people, but Connor’s got them in spades, and Abby will stand between Stephen and the world and snarl defiance. Between the two of them, maybe they can do something, but Claudia doesn’t know what.

 

            Claudia closes her eyes and licks her lips and curls up beside the fireplace she was so proud to have acquired, in her odd little flat. She doesn’t like the taste of whisky but she’s drinking it anyway. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do when she goes back to work. She doesn’t know what’s going to happen between today and Monday morning that will even make it _possible_ for her to enter the building she works in. She doesn’t know how Lester’s going to handle this. She doesn’t know what she’ll say to her mother, how she’ll explain missing the Sunday lunch they’d planned this weekend, or why Tom isn’t coming after all. She doesn’t know anything any more, except the comfort of her favourite tracksuit bottoms, soft cashmere socks that were an extravagant present in the office Secret Santa – as if she wasn’t aware that Lester threw up his hands, handed his secretary fifty pounds and told her to buy something Claudia would like; she forgives him, because he spent the time with his son in hospital instead – and an over-large sweater that has been her comfort zone for ten years.

 

            _Sandhurst 1995, Tommo_ , say the letters and numbers on the back, along with a laundry list of boys and men Claudia’s never met. The man she took it from doesn’t know her face any more. He’s probably looking for his favourite jumper right now, not knowing that it’s in her chest of drawers. In fact, it’s on her person. But it was in her chest of drawers twenty minutes ago.

 

            She hears a scratch of a key in the door, the scratch of a key that won’t turn. And then another, and another, and another. He’s a persistent man, she thinks, and hopes that he put his keys to her front door somewhere very safe where he won’t be able to find them again.

 

             The first lock clunks open. Claudia puts her glass of whisky safely down on the coffee table and curls more tightly into the bean bag she had at university. When he finally makes it into the living room, her eyes are open, but fixed blindly on the fire, and although the room is hot she’s holding herself as if she’s freezing to death.

 

            “Miss Brown,” Tom Ryan says – but not the Tom Ryan she knew this morning, waved off into an anomaly with a nod and a smile.

                                                                  

            She doesn’t answer. His fingerprints and his memories and the way he holds a gun say he’s Tom Ryan, the Tom Ryan she’s known since she was much younger and much more idealistic, except for one thing: he doesn’t remember Claudia Brown. He’s never met Claudia Brown. She’s a stranger to him.

 

            For Claudia, that is as heartbreaking as losing Nick. Two men she loved, albeit in very different ways, walked into an anomaly in the broad light of day. And two men she loved failed to come back, because Nick gurgled his last breaths in the Permian, and Tom has forgotten every second of their ten years of friendship.

 

            “Claudia?” Ryan says tentatively.

 

            “I preferred Miss Brown,” Claudia says at once, instinctively. Not him. She doesn’t want to hear her name from him. “How did you get in?”

 

            “By trying every key on my keyring. Look, Ditzy’s been explaining a few things to me. Ditzy and Lyle.”

 

            Claudia hates them both. He still remembers them.

 

            “I’m sorry,” Ryan says, after a long pause. “I’m really sorry I’m not your Tom. Or Tommo? Did you call me Tommo? Like - on the jumper you’re wearing? My jumper?” Another pause, in which she doesn’t answer his question. He’s making small talk, trying to talk her down, and that enrages her; or it would, if she could feel anything but despair right now. “Let me help you.”

 

            Claudia’s cheeks are soaking wet, and her mascara a lost cause, before she even knows she’s crying. And to her eternal shame, when this Ryan she doesn’t know, this poor substitute for the best friend she’ll ever have, scoops her up and cradles her in his arms, she only cries harder – but she also curls into his body like she curled into the firelight, and without even knowing it, she takes comfort from his warmth.

 

            When she wakes the next morning she’s fully dressed, tucked up in her own bed with a glass of water beside her. There’s food in her fridge, ready-meals and neat portions of bolognaise sauce, that she didn’t buy. The squeaking door has been fixed, a light-bulb changed, and a load of washing is whirring happily in the drier. There is a familiar key on her kitchen table and a complete absence of both whisky and Ryan.

 

            The key’s a message, and Claudia knows Ryan – a Ryan, her Ryan, the Ryan – well enough to read it.

 

           

            She makes it to Sunday lunch by the skin of her teeth and passes off what happened to Ryan as amnesia, even though she’s not sure it’s anything of the kind. She cries all over her mother, and her father burns the roast potatoes and himself while Hero is comforting her. They spent the rest of the day in the Minor Injuries Unit, eating roast beef sandwiches while Titus Brown sits still and looks persecuted. The nurses love him. Every bite tastes like ash in Claudia’s mouth (but it’s food) and every second drags (but it passes). It’s a start.

 

            _Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased_ , Claudia thinks, and is at work on Monday. Her eyes are dry and steady when she meets Lester’s, and she is scrupulously polite to Ryan. She makes an appointment with her GP, leaves the surgery with several prescriptions, all of which she fills and takes with care. She’s going to get out of this – she is, she is. Without Ryan’s help.

 

            Ryan gets injured. Seriously enough to warrant an overnight in hospital and painkillers that send him to sleep. Claudia checks on him in the hospital, sits and watches him doze for a while. “I want my Tom back,” she tells his closed face.

 

            She bumps into Ditzy on the way back, and knows he heard, knows that her careful pretence that everything’s all right, that she forgives Ryan something he didn’t do on purpose, that she’s coping, is just that – a pretence. She meets his eyes, though. His eyes fall, and she knows what he saw in hers. Something she can’t admit to aloud.

 

            She would do anything to have Tom back, and she means _anything_ ; and Ditzy, unlike most people, knows what ‘anything’ might encompass.

 

            She can’t have her Tom back. All she’s got is Ryan. And here’s her secret – her other secret, the one not even Ditzy knows; she still likes Ryan. She can accept that Nick is gone, accept it and grieve him and move on. Six months later and she can think of him without flinching, can look at the framed picture of him on the wall in the ARC without changing expression. But Ryan is here, and there’s so much about him that she likes, and things about him that she notices that she never noticed about Tom. She doesn’t know why she never noticed the promise in Tom’s smile when he looked at a woman he liked; she has no notion why she never really saw his features as a whole and realised he was handsome. She knew about his kind nature and his seriousness, but his capacity for tenderness and the dryness of his sense of humour had passed her by. And Ryan’s hands, as he passes her a cup of coffee; why had she never noticed Tom’s hands?

 

            Or had she noticed, and simply repressed it? Because she is sure Tom never wanted her, and she would never have let desire ruin what they have.

 

            Had.

 

            Claudia cries herself to sleep and then has a disconcerting dream involving Ryan – very definitely Ryan, not Tom – and his blasted attractive hands. The conjunction alarms her so much that she avoids Ryan for the rest of the week.

 

            A year in Ryan leaves a letter on her desk. Found this in my flat, reads the note accompanying it. It’s signed ‘R’. She wonders how long it’ll be before she can think of him as Tom. She reads the letter, and her certainty takes a knock.

 

            ‘I want you to know I love you’, Tom had written, coming to the point only halfway through – so very unlike him, the words so very nervous; she can see it in his writing. ‘I know you don’t love me’ (and she hadn’t loved him, she knows that much) ‘but I’m yours to command’ _._

 

             Claudia’s tempted to buy her own bottle of whisky, but firstly it’s expensive and secondly she’s watched Connor taking drinks out of Abby’s hands. Abby’s coping mechanisms are only marginally healthier than Stephen’s, although the three of them are slowly putting themselves back together again. Claudia wishes the same could be said of her. She doesn’t need to fill her prescription again and her therapist cuts down their meetings, so maybe it can.

 

            Claudia sits on her bean bag by her fire. Maybe it’s time to take a risk. Or, as someone else might put it, another step forward.

 

            Claudia isn’t someone else, but she writes the email anyway. It costs her, it takes time, it hurts to realise that Ryan won’t see [teaandsappho@hotmail.com](mailto:teaandsappho@hotmail.com) and think _Claudia_ , remembering her favourite things when she was twenty-one and permanently arguing with people about the implications of her mild to moderate obsession with an apparently bisexual poet. But she writes it anyway.

 

            ‘You won’t remember, but we used to do pizza and weird foreign movies on a regular basis. Are you free Friday evening?’

 

            He says yes. She chooses Five Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, by Pedro Almodóvar; baby Antonio Banderas is hilarious and adorable. She isn’t an unhinged betrayed wife or a slightly less unhinged betrayed girlfriend; her boyfriend isn’t a terrorist, she isn’t a two-faced lawyer, and she isn’t having an orgasm in her drugged sleep, but she still feels a certain kinship with the characters.

 

            It goes fine. He’s still not Tom, but she can live with that better than she thought she could.

 

            Maybe they can do it again, Claudia thinks to herself, staring at her bedroom ceiling long after he’s gone. Or something like it. Again and again until she accepts that Ryan and Tom are the same person, and that the only thing she can do for Tom now is to learn to care for Ryan.

 

            If that’s possible, she might once have added. She doesn’t now, because she knows it is.

 

            She won’t give up now. On Ryan or anyone else.

_Lay on, Macduff; and damn’d be him that first cries “Hold, enough!”_


End file.
